Stephen Harper is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting for the West on Russia …
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — It has been a while since a world leader used the phrase “the free world.�
Yet Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper accurately captured the moment when he resurrected that Cold War expression on Saturday in Kyiv to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked revanchism in redrawing the contours of Ukraine.
“I think it is important that we in the free world not accept the occupation of Crimea, that we continue to resist, and sanction the occupation of Crimea, and that there be no return to business as usual with the Putin regime until such time the occupation of Crimea ends,� Harper said during remarks Saturday that got wide play on Ukrainian television news shows that evening.
Because of the cowardice and/or impotence of other leaders (take your pick), Harper has been out on point, to use a military term, criticizing Putin and Russia on Ukraine and Crimea more sharply than any other leader of a major western country and calling for closely coordinated economic policies to hurt Russia.
An emergency G-7 summit is to convene in the Dutch capital on the margins of a global meeting on nuclear security on Monday. Because German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks Russian and Putin speaks German, and because Berlin has the most comprehensive, balanced trade relationship with Moscow, Merkel will remain the West’s primary conduit for trying to reason with the Russian leader.
But the G-7 will want to know what Harper learned in Kyiv. Moreover, they will continue to count on him to do the rhetorical heavy lifting about Russia’s land grab, saying that they might wish to, but don’t, lest they upset the marauding Russian Bear.
Plans are afoot to exclude Russia from the G-8 summit, which was to have been in Sochi, Russia, this June, and to instead hold a G-7 summit at exactly the same time in London. Yet Harper remains the only western leader who is certain to call on Monday for Russia’s expulsion from the G-8.
U.S. President Barack Obama acts as if he would rather walk on glass than speak plainly about Putin’s military adventurism and the dangers that lie ahead because of it. As for the feeble western Europeans, they have been shockingly subdued about Putin using his armed forces as bullies.
Other than the Poles and the Baltic mini-states, who know too well the Kremlin’s boot, but don’t have much of a voice in European debates, the continent’s leaders have been handcuffed in discussions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. This is partly because with Britain greedily leading the way, Europe has welcomed tens of billions of dollars of dirty money from a Who’s Who of Russia’s most unsavoury “biznismen.� They do not yet have much stomach for turning off access to such dubious lucre even if that means submitting their peoples to Putin’s whims.
The other reason is that the Europeans have not done much to wean themselves from Russian oil and especially Russian natural gas. While making a shambles of their high-minded green energy policies regarding wind and solar power, they have preferred to rant about Canada’s energy industry rather than work with their ally on assuring reliability of supply and reducing their dependence of Russian energy.